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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   29279 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Thanks a lot for this detailed reply! I am only vaguely aware of any of this stuff. Can you recommend a good book on WW1 to learn more?

Civil-Military Relations and the Cult of the Offensive, 1914 and 1984; by Jack Snyder. Here is a summary

The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War; by Stephen Van Evera. Here's a link to a summary... and of some other military history education sources.

Here is a thesis from an American Airforce officer on the Cult of the Offense as it applies to airpower.

I hadn't heard of the "Cult of the Offensive" before. Something I've often wondered about lately is how the world went from a system where winning territory by military conquest was just the way things were done, to our current system where the idea that one country would invade its neighbor for such base motives as gaining territory is viewed as scandalous. But maybe it makes sense for our morals to change in this way, as we adapt to the reality that defense is easier than offense.

To follow on @Dean's point on wars of conquest being too expensive to be profitable, there was also increasing traction among politicians and economists that the costs of holding foreign territory started outweighing the trade/taxes accrued from said territory. I don't have the specific literature, but Adam Smiths economic treatises regularly castigated colonial adventures as foolish, with no economic case for them due to the high frictional costs of maintaining economically leaky endeavors.

As technology improved and accessibility to said technology extended beyond European borders, the strength of relative threats diminished the European technological advantages severely. There is no point keeping a garrison in Hong Kong if the Chinese can attack strongpoints with artillery instead of swords. There is no point in keeping a Kabul FOB if the Taliban can overrun adjacent ANA positions with a text message and plink potshots eternally at US troops without consequence, etc etc.

The last major power to engage in a colonialist land grab (outside of Putin) was funny moustache man, and all his lebensraum would have lain fallow if he did not have a cooperative population working it maximally for his advantage The Russians slow worked under an ostensibly beneficial communist system simply because the communist system had unworkable incentives, theres no way they would have functioned as a slave people to faraway teutons.

Thanks, this seems like an important insight. You could say that the economic value of land just isn't as high relative to labor as it was before, say, 1800. The American "empire" receives economic value from favorable laws in foreign countries: Apple can set up factories in China, the Gap can have its factories in Bangladesh, without the government of the United States actually needing to be in charge of the day-to-day business of government in those countries. And as the economy has become more complicated, it does seem like "workers + incentives" is a cheaper and ultimately more profitable technique than "slaves + force" for extracting value from labor. This seems like a new development, so I'm surprised to hear that it was already in Adam Smith. I guess the modern economy is older than I thought.

I think the critical point is that imperialism doesn't pay if you have to pay your own troops first-world wages. Kipling in Arithmetic on the Frontier is already suggesting that the British Empire on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border was money-losing for this reason in 1886. The situation gets worse, to the point where (even with the oil) the cost to the US taxpayer of being in Iraq was of the same order of magnitude as the total GDP of Iraq.

Profitable small-scale imperialism (called "warlordism") is still going on in the parts of sub-Saharan Africa where child soldiers cost a dollar a day.

Historically the value of land and borders would have been tied to the people within the land that could be taxed, or chokepoints (ports, passes, bridges) that would keep the people or goods within a boundary to be taxed. A shitload of fertile plains is useless if peasants cannot work it, a shitload of peasants are useless if there is no land for them to work on. People are taxable, land is not. The Congo slavers sold captured slaves because their shitty land was unsuitable for agriculture in the short term, and these captives could be traded for horses guns and shinies that the congolese valued more than the ransoms of inland captures.

We also have to recognize that modern economic concepts like gross domestic product or national output is also a reflection of modernized sociopolitical advancements that allow quantification and tracking of inputs and outputs. A theoretical value of captured land has no real value if the local taxman and the taxpayer all collude to deprive the faraway sovereign of their dues.

In modern terms, the pre-Smith British view of Mercantilist economic victory was 'everyone buys my stuff', which reflects producer superiority and is the focus of trade wars. Smith and later Ricardo explored the theories of trade and comparative advantage to obtain maximal utility (US makes soybeans cheaply, so it should sell them to the Chinese who make plastic crap cheaply for mutual benefit), and this combined with the realization that colonies really were exercises in impoverishment to diminish the appeal of colonization or indeed other proximate wars.

The USA may have actually entered a hitherto unseen economic victory condition, where 'everyone wants to sell to me'. By being the buyer of highest priority, outsiders comport their own supply chains and production processes to the buyers preferences even without the buyer explicating as such. Japanese clothing giants commission Bangladeshi muslims to sew pride flags onto blue eyed blonde barbie dolls because the USA is the buyer they all aim to satisfy, not their impoverished kin or insignificant neighbours.

Historian Bret Devereaux on his blog wrote about the status quo coalition which is a somewhat related idea; he has a similar bit about how returns from development outpace returns from conquest in the modern era, making modern wars of conquest not economically worthwhile.

I hadn't heard of the "Cult of the Offensive" before.

I would strongly (and warmly) recommend reading up on it. More than a specific historical context, the Cult of the Offensive is a mindset that can be observed across periods of time, and is an example of a strategic paradigm that can simultaneously be logical (because premise can be true and valid) and illogical (because the consequences of adopting the paradigm include negative externalities that make it illogical to embrace).

Something I've often wondered about lately is how the world went from a system where winning territory by military conquest was just the way things were done, to our current system where the idea that one country would invade its neighbor for such base motives as gaining territory is viewed as scandalous. But maybe it makes sense for our morals to change in this way, as we adapt to the reality that defense is easier than offense.

Rather than scandalous, the more relevant point is 'too expensive to be profitable.'

The British and American formal empires fell because of scandal. The sense of self of what it meant to be 'civilized' precluded arbitrary and extreme uses of force, and political-ideological senses of legitimacy and democracy asserted self-limitations that, eventually, led them to no longer want to militarily enforce rule and so negotiate exits.

That negotiation- and the experience of other conquerors- was in the context that insurgencies were increasingly cheap and bloodily effective and incurring huge costs. Starting with post-WW2 military surpluses, but then expanding with the Cold War military-industrial complexes, advanced and effective and relatively portable weapons made armed resistance a real and feasible thing. The AK-47 is perhaps the hallmark of a cheap and effective peasant-usable weapon, and further advances in explosives and communications and plenty of safe support zones made supplying insurgencies very easy for anyone who either sympathized with a target, or wanted to counter an aggressor. These costs could be economically ruinous and politically disruptive.

Nationalism. There's a belief that there exists a set of people who are Germans/Czechs/Poles/Frenchmen/etc. And that the goal of international policy is, where reasonable and within constraints, to draw a circle around each group of people and allow them to form a nation state. This is a myth, the circle can't exist absent state violence, and indeed the people mostly don't exist without state violence.

The idea of conquest in an age of nationalism means either genocide or slavery. In an age of monarchy it merely means adding subjects.

Something I've often wondered about lately is how the world went from a system where winning territory by military conquest was just the way things were done, to our current system where the idea that one country would invade its neighbor for such base motives as gaining territory is viewed as scandalous.

American hegemony. While the particular details of a Wilsonian internationalism weren't carried forward entirely intact, the system of global diplomacy supported by the American foreign policy Establishment in the aftermath of WWII was premised on the idea of sovereign nation states participating peacefully in international institutions that respected human rights understood in an American sort of way (sort of).

That, combined with nuclear weapons, made territorial conquest Problematic. It actually still happens and countries even mostly get away with it from time to time, but it rests less easily on the global consciousness than it did in 1780 or even 1880.

countries even mostly get away with it from time to time

Since WWII, who’s gotten away with land grabs via military invasion? I’m only aware of Russia in Crimea, and even that was more of a coup than a traditional military invasion and occupation like the War of 1870.

Off the top of my head there’s the 1951 Chinese annexation of Tibet, the various land grabs between Israel and its neighbours, the 1961 annexation of Goa by India, and the 1975 Indonesia annexation of East Timor. Depending how you frame it the Vietnam war ended either with North Vietnam annexing South Vietnam or the reunification of a single nation split by civil war.

There’s also been failed annexation attempts post ww2, like the 1950 North Korean invasion of South Korea and the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

Great list, thanks. I suppose Tibetan independence after the collapse of the Qing was never internationally recognized, so legally that’s more of an internal matter than an international annexation.

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